Global Climate Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago

Despite playing a key role in advancing climate change hysteria, the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service, known as the Met Office, quietly released a report last week conceding that so-called “global warming” actually stopped more than 15 years ago. The startling admission shows once again that United Nations theories and climate models are wildly inaccurate at best, experts say, meaning multi-trillion dollar schemes to deal with alleged human-caused “climate change” are at the very least severely misguided.

According to the latest UK Met Office report, first reported by the Daily Mail, there has been no noticeable increase in global temperatures since early 1997. The alleged warming trend supposedly observed from 1980 to 1996 was about as long as the current “plateau” period, the paper reported. Prior to that, climate scientists admit, global temperatures had been stable or dropping for decades, a fact that prompted previous generations of climate alarmists to sound the alarm about the supposed dangers of man-made “global cooling.”

“Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete. Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect,” Georgia Tech climate science department chief Professor Judith Curry told the Daily Mail. “It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.”

The Met Office temperature data report is known as Hadcrut 4 because it is compiled by the Met Office’s Hadley Center and the now-disgraced Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia — the institution at the center of the infamous ClimateGate scandal that exposed so-called “climate scientists” fudging numbers, covering up contradictory data, conspiring to attack dissenting experts, and unlawfully trying to evade freedom of information requests. Unsurprisingly, the CRU’s discredited boss, Phil Jones, downplayed the significance of the latest findings.

Despite having claimed in 2009 that if there were no warming for 15 years it would be time for climate alarmists to “get worried,” Jones now says 15 years is not a long enough span to draw any conclusions. At least 20 years will be needed before the climate hysteria can be reconsidered, the controversial climate activist — he styles himself a scientist despite his unabashed activism — told the Daily Mail, adding that the ongoing lack of global warming “could go on for a while.” He apparently still thinks this decade will be warmer than the last, though he admitted that the wild climate models predicting doom were based on multiple uncertainties.

“We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming,” Jones admitted to the paper, apparently acknowledging what skeptical climate scientists have been attempting to convey for years. “We don’t know what natural variability is doing.”

Also in 2009, meanwhile, the alarmist Met Office predicted that three of the next five years would set new world records for warming. Now that the data has proven the wildly alarmist prediction false, however, a spokesperson for the agency had no comment on it. Still, the Met Office, like Jones — both depending largely on taxpayer funding that will dry up if and when climate hysteria disappears — also tried to downplay the latest data. “Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading,” a Met Office spokesperson said. “Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system.”

The Hadcrut 4 information comes from thousands of monitoring points around the world, including more than a few spots that have been criticized for being too close to artificially warm urban areas. Still, the latest report totally contradicts alarmist forecasts about surging temperature increases that have served to justify massive expenditures of taxpayer money around the world. For experts, it is only more evidence that making global decisions on the basis of bogus climate models is a bad idea.

“The IPCC expresses great certainty in the results of the models — which is completely unfounded. A number of natural climate cycles are excluded, even though these cycles produce significant changes in temperatures," Executive Vice President Ken Haapala with the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) told The New American earlier this year. “The ultimate test of models is their ability to predict the future. As measured by satellites, there has been no global warming for over a decade, which the models failed to predict. The divergence between measured temperatures and predictions is increasing.”

More than a dozen climate experts, including professors at the most prestigious universities in the world and scientists who worked with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also told The New American in recent months that the global warming models were deeply flawed at best. The latest report from the Met Office — virtually ignored by the world media despite the press’s tendency to trumpet even the most absurd climate scaremongering — confirms those suspicions yet again.

The spectacular implosion of the alleged “science” behind now-discredited global warming theories in recent years has led many experts and scientists to distance themselves from the hysteria. However, some apparently oblivious politicians, even in the United States, where the public has largely become hostile to the alarmism and proposed “solutions,” continue to insist that taxpayers must fund ever more expensive and grandiose schemes to stop “climate change.”

“By the way, yes, my plan will reduce the carbon pollution that is eating our planet because climate change is not a hoax,” President Obama said at a campaign rally last week, absurdly portraying the essential gas CO2 exhaled by humans and consumed by plants as a “pollutant” in need of regulation. “More droughts and hurricanes and wildfires, that’s not a joke. That’s a threat to our children’s future, and we can do something about it.”

Critics say that even if the debunked climate models were accurate and human-caused carbon dioxide emissions — a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — were contributing seriously to global warming, the half-baked, multi-trillion-dollar efforts to stop it would still be absurd. More likely, however, is that the increasingly embattled global warming scam is an attempt to help foist global governance on the planet while extracting even more wealth from the people of the world, opponents of the alarmism tell The New American.

Whether the latest Met Office report will eventually be covered by the world press remains unclear. What has become certain, though, is that supposed climate “scientists” and models predicting imminent doom were wrong yet again. Spending even more trillions on ineffective “solutions” to deal with a dubious alleged problem that may not even exist, then, would be not just a total waste of resources, but a dangerous proposition that could see the out-of-control UN handed even more power. Experts say it is time to return to reality and put the climate scam to rest once and for all.

Last month was the 333rd consecutive month that global temperatures were above the 20th century average, and 2012 will almost certainly be the hottest ever recorded in the US. Hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires and droughts blistered farmlands and ruined crops from Kansas to Assam, and Britain has had its wettest summer and driest spring to date. Nigeria, China and much of India and Australia have all had their worst floods in decades. In September the Arctic sea ice cover shrank 50% below the 1979-2000 average.http://www.alipac.us/f9/time-running-out-doha-climate-talks-must-put-end-excuses-267708/